Poland is not a chemical element

Javier Vallejo, EL PAIS

To Alfred Jarry, Poland, the scenery of his play Ubu the King was a synonym of ‘nowhere’: a country with transient borders, flooded by waves of aggressive neighbors and being reborn again, almost like the mythical island of Saint Brendan. The experience of being erased from the map created a very strong feeling of national identity in Poland, on which Dorota Masłowska (born 1983 in Wejherowo) ironically comments in No matter how hard we tried: “Long time ago, when the Earth was ruled by God’s law, all were Poles: Germans, Swedes, Spaniards… Then we had rivers, islands and oceans, and we were an oasis of tolerance and multi-culture”, says a speaker on a radio belonging to the protagonists, that is a family greedily reading magazines, consuming food from discount store Lidl and watching junk TV.

With a disarming sense of humor Masłowska reviews the recent history of her country by presenting a typical lower class family, forced to live in a one-room apartment. In her much appraised novel White and Red (written at the age of 18 and published in Spain by Mondadori) the author points out a strong resemblance between the lack of perspectives of her mother’s generation, raised in the communist system, and the heavy perspective hanging over young people born after the fall of the iron curtain and raised in a consumer society.

In a simple, true and visually beautiful staging by Grzegorz Jarzyna, this seemingly distant world turns out to be strangely familiar: here we also struggle to get our own apartments, we know what a shift from autarchism to rampant capitalism means and we heal a kind of inferiority complex towards all that which is foreign by injections of national pride. A suggestive and sharp play, the only distraction is the second, less interesting plot. Vitality of the actress Danuta Szaflarska is to be envied, 96 years old and still acting.